Love your habits

The other day, while I was listening to a radio program, I bumped into a clip from the film “Eat, Pray, Love”. The opening dialogue between the two actors and the following reflections fully represents our condition as mere mortals. Nobody loves changes, we rather laze in our habits.

Suddenly Liz’ partner shouts:“I like it messy”; and if it is true that we are so attached to our weaknesses, how can we evolve, grow, re-born?

In the first part of the scene, David proposes a solution to the bitter rift of their relationship:

“What if we just acknowledge that we have a screwed up relationship and we stick it out anyway? We accept that we fight a lot… and we hardly have sex anymore… but that we don’t wanna live without each other. And that way we can spend our lives together miserable, but happy not to be apart.”

Here is what happens! For couples, businesses and also in professionals’ lives: settling, going on passively, walking following paths marked by our habits, instead of facing the problems and the current “ruins”.

“Like the Augusteum resisted the test of time, making it through raids and destruction, getting back to itself every time, we should have the courage to face changes”.

Have you ever wondered what are the forces which control your personal and/or professional life?

I’m not talking about esoteric forces, but of real forces, that act upon human psyche motivating it to do certain acts like killing, stealing, betraying, but also others like make millions instead of trying a working career, going on TV or, simply, standing out.

The truth is that all our actions depends on 2 things only:

PLEASURE and PAIN

Understanding and using pleasure and pain forces will allow you to create those changes and improvements that you desire or worry about. When we “love” the way we lead our life, we are associating “pleasure” to comfort.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure, rather than let pain and pleasure use you. If you do it, you maintain the control of your life. If you don’t do it, your life controls you.

At the mercy of our emotions.

Consider how many negative incentives can influence our life. We are subject to very many decisions based on sensations.

But if this is true for negative incentives, it is true also for positive ones, so with the right tools, the right experience and the right training you can be able to create unconscious incentives that will allow you to act automatically for your own good, not your own bad.

Seen from this perspective is certainly better, isn’t it?

If you associate a big pain to every behaviour or emotional frame of mind, you’ll avoid to satisfy the incentive. You can use this discovery to take advantage of the pleasure and pain force and to virtually change everything around you.

 Angelo Fanizzi